Truth, lies and travel writing

The capacity of travel writers to distort the truth - amplifying their observations, claiming credit for what they never witnessed or inventing fabulous narratives wholesale from the imagination rather than experience - has always been recognized. The richness of possibility in this domain did not escape the notice of Thomas More, William Shakespeare and Jonathan Swift. At the dawn of early modern travel and exploration, More’s Utopia (1516) features an imagined traveller, Raphael Hythlodaeus, who ostensibly makes his way on the fourth voyage of Amerigo Vespucci to the New World before setting off on his own and encountering an island whose actual existence he insists upon, despite the name Utopia indicating itself (to readers with sufficient Greek) as ou topos, no place. In the next century, Shakespeare’s Othello dazzles Desdemona with tales of ‘antres vast’, cannibals and men with heads between their shoulders - a predilection condemned by Iago as nothing more than ‘bragging and telling her fantastical lies’ (II.i.226). By the time we reach Gulliver in 1726, the potential for abusing one’s readership with untruths has become so familiar that Swift reinvented it on a grand scale, providing his hero with an engraved portrait in the second edition supported by the motto ‘splendide mendax’ (splendid or glittering liar; for a reproduction see Barchas (1998: 268)).